The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry introduces John Crowe Ransom with the claim that his "poems could never be mistaken for anybody
else's."(1) As introductions go, it is a good one, yet the
poetry itself -- like its creator -- tends to stand a bit aloof, an easy
acquaintance, but difficult to fathom. Robert Penn Warren has said that
there is "something inconclusive" about Ransom's poems, a
statement echoed by many critics and embodied in various critical
debates. Is, for example, the speaker of "Dead Boy"
inappropriately cold (David Perkins), or merely "objective"
(Robert Buffington)?(2) Is Ransom's poetry best characterized as
full of "mockery and playfulness" (Delmore Schwartz), or of
"terror and savagery" (Louis D. Rubin, Jr.)?(3) Ransom would
have found it ironic that so many of the disagreements surrounding his
poetry center on interpretations -- this for a man who in his entire
corpus of literary criticism offers hardly a single reading, and who
frustrated generations of undergraduates by his unwillingness to tell
them what a poem "meant." Indeed, a good portion of the
"New Critical" criticism of Ransom exhibits few of the virtues
of his own theoretical approach, focusing almost exclusively upon
readings and neglecting the ontology -- to use one of his favorite terms
-- of the poems themselves.(4) Buffington has pointed out that analyses
of Ransom's poetry have usually centered upon an examination of
irony (p. 9). Although several critics (Warren, Cleanth Brooks, G. R.
Wasserman, F. O. Matthiessen, Thomas Daniel Young) have produced
insightful criticism via an irony-based approach, I agree with
Buffington that irony has probably been overemphasized.(5) In this
essay, I examine Ransom's speaker, arguing that the ironic stance
usually ascribed to this figure fails to explain fully its role, which
in providing linguistic access to the "world's body,"
foregrounds its own poetic medium.

Before examining Ransom's speaker, however, we should first
note that when we refer to a poem's "speaker," we may be
referring to one or more of a number of things: a reporter of action, a
character who him- or herself acts, a persona who reveals him- or
herself (wittingly or unwittingly) during the course of the poem, a
moralizer with our best interests at heart, even a relative non-entity
whose only "role" is as generator of the language we are
reading. Roman Jakobson's well-known paradigm of verbal
communication provides a useful framework for categorizing the different
roles a speaker might play:

context (referential)
message (poetic)

addresser (emotive)-- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- -- addressee (conative)

contact (phatic)
code (metalingual)

According to Jakobson, any speech act (of which poetry is a subset)
entails six constitutive elements. The addresser sends a message to an
addressee. The message requires a context (or referent), a code
("language") at least partially common to the addresser and
addressee, and a contact, the physical channel and psychological
connection between addresser and addressee.(6) When one of these
elements predominates in the speech act, the verbal structure of the
message is altered. The emotive function, for example, "aims at a
direct expression of the speaker's attitude," while the
conative function is oriented toward the addressee, often involving
imperatives (pp. 22-23). The referential function dominates everyday
discourse, as when we are "speaking of something." The poetic
function, according to Jakobson, focuses attention upon the message
itself "for its own sake," as opposed to its more usual
subsidiary, accessory role (for example, in speaking about the weather,
we are unlikely to concern ourselves with rhyme and meter) (p. 25).(7)

In poetic discourse (using a broader definition than Jakobson), a
rough correlation suggests itself between sub-dominant function and
poetic genre, as illustrated by the following diagram:

referential (narrative poetry)
poetic (lyric poetry)

emotive (dramatic poetry) -- -- -- -- -- -- conative (didactic
poetry)(8) Aside from purely lyric poetry, where it tends to be rather
ambiguous, the speaker's role generally orients itself in a
particular direction -- toward the emotive, referential, or conative
functions.(9) In Ransom's poetry, however, a rather eclectic and
unusual amalgam of poetic genres obscures the reader's perception
of a speaker whose "role" or "character traits"
infuse and inform an entire poem. Virtually all of Ransom's poems
contain a narrative "situation"; well over half contain a
first-person pronoun; many contain imperatives. Yet the "I" of
a Ransom poem typically remains a shadowy presence, often appearing only
at the beginning or end of the poem, or interspersed at seemingly random
points. In The New Criticism, Ransom claims that

Most poems -- exceptions would be poems in the "grand
style" or poems in the severe

classical" style-particularize themselves with great
naturalness because they

also "strong," but it prefers to entrust it to a speaker
out of the common ranks of

humanity, who is to speak it in "character." (pp. 61-62)
The "character" of a number of his own poems, however, retains
but a vestige of any dramatic character, often frustrating the
reader's impulse toward hypostatizing a tangible persona. With a
few exceptions, constructing a persona for a Ransom speaker is a
difficult task, almost inevitably leading to claims like, "the
speaker of |Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter' is someone
who is |astonished' and |vexed.'" Whereas we can, with
some confidence, call Browning's Duke of Ferrara "cruel"
and "proud," Ransom's speakers generally resist
extra-textual description. The reader, to put the matter another way, is
forced to construct a speaker tautologically, if he or she chooses to do
so at all.

Yet our impulse toward constructing a persona is strong. In his
consideration of deictics in lyric poetry, Jonathan Culler claims that
the presence of a deictic "I" forces us to decide "what
kind of |I' the poem secretes, and give the answer a central place
in our interpretation."(10") Although I do not necessarily
consider this a sound prescription (at least for Ransom), Culler is
doubtless correct in describing a New Critical convention that many
readers and critics bring to bear on a lyric poem.(11) Discussing the
uneasiness and consequent misreadings Ransom's quasi-personae have
induced in several critics, Buffington writes:

The vagueness about the narrator of which the [unnamed] critic
complains in "Here

Lies a Lady" is due really to the fact that there is no
narrator at all -- that is, no

speaker distinct from the poet, as long as we understand that by
poet we do not

mean the historical John Crowe Ransom. The I of "Here Lies a
Lady" is no different

from the I of "The Equilibrists," or "Spectral
Lovers," or "Good Ships"; in these

poems there is no intention to make the I a distinct character,
with a distinct relation

to other distinct characters, as the term "narrator" or
"speaker" might imply.

(pp. 8-9) I agree with Buffington's analysis, particularly
with respect to the poems he cites, although he does little by way of
explaining the enigmatic presence of such a speaker (or poet, as he has
it). Referring back to Jakobson's diagram, we can posit a speaker
(addresser) whose inherently emotive function is generally subsumed
within a poetic one. Using Ransom's terminology, poetic texture
supersedes dramatic propriety. Where we expect the "I" to
express -- directly or indirectly -- attitudes or embody traits, it
confounds our expectations and instead foregrounds its own poetic
milieu. Thus, the speaker, along with the function he traditionally
represents, is collapsed within the verbal artifact. The shadowy and
often fleeting presence of the speaker frequently serves to heighten the
reader's awareness of this collapse, thus heightening the
tangibility of the poem itself.

Once constructed, however, the speaker does not simply disappear:
the voice remains. Although reading, say, "Captain Carpenter"
as the "speech of a" |character' in a
|situation'" may well be misleading, this is not to claim that
"dramatic propriety" becomes entirely irrelevant, or that
there is an internal discontinuity. On the contrary, the dramatic or
emotive element is merely backgrounded. The historical movement Ransom
posits from the dramatic monologue to lyric poetry is frequently
embodied within his own poems, which often juxtapose the
"speech" of a "persona" -- sometimes a relatively
tangible one, although usually less so -- with a more lyric mode in
which the speaker's role is less self-reflexive, and consequently
more ambiguous. A useful way of approaching Ransom's poetry is in
terms of the speaker's "relative presence" -- how overtly
he calls attention to himself. In the poems I will consider, the
presence of the "I" generally indicates a discursive,
orientational, often colloquial, verbal construction, while the absence
of the "I" often parallels heightened poetic diction and
increased use of metaphor. In some sense, then, this movement of the
speaker can be described as from (literally) "speaker" to
"poet."

When Ransom's speaker retains his status as dramatic persona
throughout, as in "Puncture," "Old Mansion," or the
sonnet sequence "Two Gentlemen in Bonds," the result is often
a weak poem. "Old Man Playing with Children' provides an
interesting contrast, although it, too, is not entirely successful. In
it, the speaker appears only once, in the second stanza:(12)

But I will unriddle for you the thought of his mind,

An old one you cannot open with conversation.

What animates the thin legs in risky motion?

Mixes the snow on the head with the snow on the wind?(13) The first
line of this stanza constructs the discursive frame of the poem,
containing an addresser ("I"), an addressee ("you"),
and a referent ("the thought of his mind"). The second line,
however, calls discourse itself into question, for the old man cannot be
"open[ed] with conversation." It is a mistake to confuse the
speaker with an omniscient narrator, as does Thornton Parsons, who
laments this "crude device": "This narrator has a purely
mechanical function, to relay to the reader the old man's thought;
his presence is not justified by a more subtle or more complex view than
the old man's' (p. 86). On the contrary, the relationship
between the speaker and the old man is more complex and ambiguous than
Parsons allows, for in "unriddle-ing" the thought of his mind
in the poem's final three stanzas, the speaker effects a poetic
conflation with the old man:

"Grandson, grandsire. We are equally boy and boy.

Do not offer your reclining-chair and slippers

With tedious old women talking in wrappers.

This life is not good but in danger and in joy.

"It is you the elder to these and younger to me

Who are penned as slaves by properties and causes

And never walk from your insupportable houses

And shamefully, when boys shout, go in and flee.

"May God forgive me, I know your middling ways,

Having taken care and performed ignominies unreckoned

Between the first brief childhood and the brief second,

But I will be more honorable in these days." (P, p. 32) These
stanzas ostensibly provide an answer to the questions posed in lines
three and four of the second stanza, particularly the latter:
"[what] Mixes the snow on the head with snow on the wind)"
This line embodies Jakobson's binary division of the symbolic
process, containing both metaphor (the old man's hair is
"snow") and metonymy (suggested by the contiguity -- the
"mixing" -- of the two types of "snow").(14) As
Jakobson puts it, "Similarity superimposed on contiguity imparts.
to poetry its thoroughgoing symbolic, multiplex, polysemantic
essence" (p. 42). It should be noted that the contiguity of
Ransom's line overlays a referential plane onto a verbal one: not
only are the two types of "show" physically contiguous, they
are the same word. The conflation of metaphor and metonymy within the
word "snow" is typical of Ransom's strategy of evading
discursive constructions, the erection of which, according to R. P.
Blackmur, leads to words "with the least possible meaning
preserved, instead of the most."(15)

The juxtaposition of discursive and poetic elements in stanza two
is bound up in the figure of the speaker, whose discourse is directly
represented. A similar juxtaposition exists in the "speech" of
the old man, the first line of which contains the same combination of
metaphor and metonymy as the line immediately preceding it. Like the
previous line, which juxtaposes literal snow with metaphoric snow (as
white hair), the opening line of the old man's speech --
"Grandson, grandsire. We are equally boy and boy" -- employs
the word "boy" both literally and metaphorically. The
similarity between the way language is poetically handled in these lines
makes it difficult to distinguish between the speaker and the old man.
Taking into account that the speaker has assumed direct responsibility
for the "unriddle-ing," I read the last three stanzas as the
speaker's "poem," his attempt to give linguistic form to
the riddle with which he is confronted. Although it is largely
discursive, the remainder of the "old man's speech"
contains other poetic structures that serve the speaker's professed
objective, most notably the continued use of metonymy and metaphor. Just
as the "reclining-chair and slippers" are metonymically equated with the patronizing treatment of the elderly, the adults to
whom the speech is addressed are metaphorically "penned as slaves
by properties and causes," and "the first brief
childhood" is metaphorically equated with "the brief
second." Furthermore, the adults "never walk from their
insupportable houses," a metonymic "walking motif," so to
speak, the obverse of "thin legs in risky motion."

The doubling of key terms that have both literal and figurative
significance -- snow, boy, childhood -- foregrounds, in Jan
Mukarovsky's sense of the word, the semiotic status of "Old
Man Playing with Children"; its verbal signs are made palpable as
signs.(16) Coexistent with any self-focused message, according to
Jakobson, is ambiguity, which extends from the message itself to include
the addresser and addressee, resulting in a "quasi-quoted
discourse' (p. 42). The poem-within-a poem structure of "Old
Man Playing with Children," as I have suggested, calls into
question the identity of the speaker. But more importantly, I think, the
poetic foregrounding calls attention away from the notion of identity
and directs it toward the construction of empathy on the part of the
speaker for the old man. William Elford Rogers argues that lyric poems
in which "speaker" and "poet" are not identical --
what he calls poems of "anomalous voice" -- are best
interpreted using a model of empathy in which there is a movement from
pre-discursive, symbolic, concrete intuition to discursive, conceptual
knowledge.(17) In Ransom's poem, in which the speaker/old man
relationship functions much like Rogers's poet/speaker
relationship, the empathetic movement embodied in the old man's
speech follows a similar pattern, beginning with a pre- (or extra-)
discursive poetic formulation and moving toward a discursive assertion
in the poem's final line. This movement toward discourse, rather
than away from it, is atypical for Ransom, whose better poems usually
employ the opposite strategy.

When Ransom's poetry contains -- as is often the case --
archaic or mock-poetic diction, or odd rhyme, the common critical
response has been to attribute these features to an ironic, detached
speaker. Speaking for a number of critics, David Perkins claims that
Ransom's poetry creates a wide distance between the speaker and his
subject" (p. 104). With critics such as Perkins, this
"ironic" stance has often led to charges of coldness directed
at the speaker; for others, such as Brooks, Warren, and R. W. B. Lewis,
the distance is of a kinder nature:

II.

In Ransom's poetry, we may say, the characteristic tenderness,
the charity, the pitifulness

with which he describes his characters, appears, paradoxically,
only when

the persona is more rigorously detached from the world of the
subjects: that is, when

the observer is located at a greater distance. Thus irony -- and
here we may call irony

a kind of index of the distance -- makes the tenderness, the
involvement, possible.

(My emphasis)(18) Although my own view is closer to that of the
second group, I think that they too needlessly hypostatize a speaker who
is deliberately disengaged from "the world of the subjects."
The phrase "rigorously detached" -- echoed by several critics
-- suggests a trait of the persona (i.e., the persona has an ironic
attitude), rather than a condition in which he finds himself, which is
more often the case. This admittedly fine distinction can be illustrated
by any number of poems. The speaker of "Janet Waking," for
example, does not "detach himself" from the death of the
"dainty-feathered hen"; he merely occupies a perspective from
which the death is not tragic. Similarly, the "distance"
between the speaker and the young ladies of "Blue Girls" is
not so much a function of his character as it is of his age: he is older
and he knows more than they. In these poems and others, the speaker
comes to represent not merely a particular person, or even a type
(although again, these entities are not wholly disregarded), but a
condition of consciousness, specifically that of the post-Cartesian
mind. Ransom continually affirmed the efficacy of poetry in mediating
the dualistic dilemma. As he writes in The World's Body,
"Where is the body and solid substance of the world? It seems to
have retired into the fulness of memory, but out of this we construct
the fulness of poetry, which is counterpart to the world's
fulness."(19) I contend that the language of poetry -- always for
Ransom a stylized, self-conscious language -- itself permits re-access
to the world's fulness, almost apart from its grounding in a
discrete persona. Discussing what he calls the "impersonal
lyric," Rogers claims that lyric poems without an overt speaker are
best interpreted using a model of "aesthetic contemplation," a
"state in which one |feels' oneself |in' [some physical
thing] that is not oneself" (p. 104). The collapse of the speaker I
have been describing entails a similar process, a motion away from the
speaker's discursive self-construction toward a poetic knowledge of
the world's body.

The ironic label which has attached itself so often to
Ransom's speaker is also misleading in that the phase suggests that
the matter at hand could have been treated in a more
"straightforward" manner. Doubtless it could, but the result
would not be a poem. That we do not have "direct access" to
the subject matter, this line of reasoning goes, is directly
attributable to the speaker as a function of his character. It may be
relevant that, almost invariably, the "obscuring" features of
a Ransom poem are not contiguous with the speaker's overt presence.
In "Captain Carpenter," for instance, a poem as
quintessentially Ransom as any in his oeuvre, the "I" appears
in four lines, all of which are simple and discursive:

I wish he had delivered half his blows

. . .

I heard him asking in the grimmest tone

. . .

I would not knock old fellows in the dust

. . .

I thought him Sirs an honest gentleman. (P, pp. 33-35) More
importantly, this argument does not take into account that the access we
do have via the speaker -- usually in his role as "poet" -- is
often peculiarly perspicuous; as Graham Hough has shrewdly remarked,
"Nothing said about Captain Carpenter could be as effective as this
subtly chosen manner of telling his story."(20) A more general
issue at stake, however, is the notion of irony as it is typically
attributed to the speaker in New Critical discourse. Irony is a strategy
of attributing poetic texture to persona. Because, if the poem is to
avoid becoming what Northrup Frye calls the "sub-poetical level of
metrical talk," the ironic relationship must allow for the
ambiguity inherent in poetic language, the speaker must avoid
"saying what he means." This, in turn, becomes a feature of
the speaker's identity. Although we might be tempted to do away
with this notion according to Occam's Razor, we have more concrete
reasons for at least modifying it in relation to Ransom's work.

Paradoxically, the concept of irony relies, in one respect, on the
transparency of language. When we read a line of poetry as the voice of
an ironic speaker, we are looking through the language to the fictive construct that lies behind it. This apprehension, as John Hollander
says, involves the suppression of the linguistic nature of the poem.(21)
The relative presence of Ransom's speaker -- which, to repeat,
parallels the relative emphasis on discursive and poetic constructions
-- creates what Robert Scholes describes as a "literary tension
between the utterance as communicative and externally referential, on
the one hand, and as incommunicative and self-referential, on the
other."(22) The mistake common to New Critical analyses of Ransom
is the emphasis on a given poem's architectural structure, an
emphasis that tends to generate "rules" concerning the
speaker's role that apply to an entire poem at once. On the
contrary, the temporal interplay between the speaker's various
roles is often at the very heart of the poem. For example, in the
quotation above, Brooks claims that the speaker's "rigorous
detachment" -- his irony or "distance" --
"paradoxically" makes "involvement" possible. My
claim is that this paradox is often resolved during the course of a
poem, and usually involves a motion away from a discursively grounded
identity toward an empathetic or contemplative knowledge available
through poetically foregrounded, rather than discursive, uses of
language.

The neglected poem "Dog" -- a "trifling" work,
"with insufficient wit or charm to counteract the doggerel,"
according to Parsons (p. 116) -- is perhaps Ransom's most sustained
poetic treatment of the relationship between discourse and poetry. The
poem begins with two primarily discursive stanzas:

Cock-a-doodle-doo the brass-lined rooster says,

Brekekekex intones the fat Greek frog--

These fantasies do not terrify me as

The bow-wow-wow of dog.

I had a little doggie who used to sit and beg,

A pretty little creature with tears in his eyes

And anomalous hand extended on his leg;

Housebroken was my Huendchen, and so wise. (P, p. 59) Noting the
apparently anomalous nature of these stanzas, we might pose the question
of what they accomplish: what do we learn about the speaker, and is this
information important with respect to the rest of the poem, in which the
speaker does not appear at all? The most important feature of these
stanzas -- particularly the first -- is the dissociation manifest
between the speaker's own emotive, discursive language and language
that is more closely associated with the natural world, here embodied in
the onomatopoeic terms "cock-a-doodle-doo,"
"brekekekex," and "bow-wow-wow."(23) While the first
two are merely "fantasies," the last is a source of terror (it
is important to note that it is the sound, not the dog, which
terrifies). Thus, in "telling" us something about himself, the
speaker is in effect separated from sound, which of course is ironic
when one considers that the medium here -- a poem -- foregrounds its
status as a series of sounds.

As the poem shifts into a more poetic (or mock-poetic) mode,
beginning with the transitional "However" in stanza four, the
interplay between "pure" sound and sound that has been
reductively translated into discourse remains a focus of the poem:

But, on arriving at the gap in the fence,

Behold! again the ubiquitous hairy dog,

Like a numerous army rattling the battlements

With shout, though it is but his monologue,

With a lion's courage and a bee's virulence

Though he is but one dog.

Shrill is the fury of the proud red bull,

His knees quiver, and the honeysuckle vine

Expires with anguish as his voice, terrible,

Cries, "What do you want of my twenty lady kine?" (P, p.
59) The bull's voice, like the "sorrowing Moo" of his
"blameless ladies," is easily (though absurdly) translated by
the speaker. The sound of the dog, an amorphous "monologue,"
proves more difficult. The dog is compared to "a numerous army
rattling the battlements[With shout," a simile emphasizing that
this beast is not to be confused with the housebroken Huendchen or
Madam's Fido, who "Rehearses his pink paradigm, To yap"
in the third stanza. The anomalous simile of that stanza's first
line ("Booms the voice of a big dog like a bell")
retrospectively assumes a new significance, for it is the first simile
in a poem which has only three, each describing a threatening dog. The
ostensible disappearance of the speaker after the second stanza
parallels the conflation of his emotive role with the physical
characteristics of the poem -- its increasing emphasis on its own
artifice. The simple masculine rhymes of the first three stanzas are
replaced by a doggerel rhyme that would do the Byron of Don Juan proud:
fence/battlements, them/mayhem, bull/beautiful, dog/monologue,
vine/kine, and so on.

The artifice apparent in the physical poem highlights the
artificiality of the attempt to fit the world into a discursive frame
via the speaker. Although it is tempting to read this artificiality in
terms of the speaker's identity, we must note that the speaker
becomes less of a persona as the poem proceeds, and more engaged with
the scene he reports. The culmination of the movement away from identity
comes in the last stanza, which embodies a profound shift in tone:

Old Hodge stays not his hand, but whips to kennel

The renegade. God's peace betide the souls

Of the pure in heart! But in the box that fennel

Grows round, are two red eyes that stare like coals. (p. 60) The
emjambement of the first three lines highlights the end stop of the
culminating last line, which in some sense is the only
"serious" line in the entire poem, containing only its third
simile. As I have noted, the first two similes also deal with a
threatening dog, yet this last one differs in that it is not related to
the dog's sound (or voice, as the speaker has it). The dog,
finally, resists comparison to a bell or a rhetorician. The tension
between what the world "says" and what it is finds some
resolution in the concluding image, suggesting what Ransom claims
throughout his theoretical work: that poetry allows us a special access.
The world's meaning -- its body -- cannot be translated via a
discursive frame into discourse. The simile itself -- the "two red
eyes that stare like coals" -- is quintessentially poetic, a
metaphoric construction contiguous to both verbal structure (it rhymes)
and physical scene: the "fennel/Grows round" the dog's
box, suggesting the latter as a point of reference, a center. The key
word in the simile is "stare," which modifies "eyes"
rather than "coals." In the original version of the poem,
published in Two Gentlemen in Bonds (1927), this line reads: "Two
red eyes shine with chemistry of coals."(24) The later construction
suggests that language will have to bend toward the beast, rather than
vice-versa.

In "Dog," then, we find a speaker whose function as
speaker -- to "translate" the natural world -- is shown to be
inadequate to the task. The concluding simile completes the poem by
showing why: access to the world's body is available only through
an extra-discursive use of language. Metaphor, which bridges the space
between referential and poetic functions, is in some sense
self-contained, not relying on its creator or audience. One of
Ransom's most famous poems, "Dead Boy," further explores
the relationship between speaker and metaphor:

The little cousin is dead, by foul subtraction,

A green bough from Virginia's aged tree,

And none of the county kill like the transaction,

Nor some of the world of outer dark, like me.

A boy not beautiful, nor good, nor clever,

A black cloud full of storms too hot for keeping,

A sword beneath his mother's heart -- vet never

Woman bewept her babe as this is weeping.

A pig with a pasty. face, so I had said,

Squealing for cookies, kinned by poor pretense

With a noble house. But the little man quite dead,

I see the forbear's antique lineaments. (P, p. 5) The speaker
here, at least initially, is more tangible than in most Ransom poems; he
is apparently a distant relative or friend of the family, and he has (or
has had) definite feelings about the dead boy. Discussing the "wide
distance between speaker and subject," David Perkins remarks that
"To speak of a child's death as a |subtraction' is
peculiar and oblique to the nth degree, and so also is calling it a
|transaction.' Reinforced by the rhyme, the terms inevitably
suggest that the boy's death is not much felt by the speaker"
(p. 104). Although I perceive the speaker's feelings, even at the
beginning, as being more ambiguous than Perkins allows, he is certainly
correct in attributing a sort of emotional flatness to the first stanza.
The terms he highlights are oblique, and the metaphor of the second line
appears superfluous, inappropriately romanticized in relation to the
stanza's generally understated language (note particularly the
litotes of the next line). Although, as Parsons, notes, here it is but a
tired version of the family-tree cliche, this same metaphor -- in
slightly altered form -- appears again at the conclusion of the poem,
where the emotional and poetic effect is markedly different.

As in "Dog," the speaker's relative presence
diminishes during the course of "Dead Boy." The second stanza,
in which the speaker does not appear, is framed by, an evaluative first
and a descriptive last line -- lines perceived as being grounded in a
persona. Yet the metaphoric second and third lines resist this
grounding, their respective vehicles -- "cloud" and
"storm" -- assuming some of the "weight" of the
speaking voice. In Ransom's reading of this poem for the Yale
Series of Recorded Poets, the contrast in tone between the highly
inflected first and last lines and the regular, uninflected second and
third lines is quite perceptible, suggestive of the distinction I am
making between the "speaking" and the "poetic"
voices.(25) The first line of the third stanza delineates a past
relationship between metaphor and speaker. "A pig with a pasty
face, so I had said." The discursive qualification of the metaphor
indicates the speaker's awareness that the boy's death has
transmuted his metaphor's context, and thus the metaphor itself,
which will not cohere to the "forbear's antique
lineaments" the speaker perceives now that the little man is
"quite dead." (Presumably these lineaments are not hoglike.)
The present context, forcefully presented in the poem's fourth
stanza, requires a different metaphor:

He was pale and little, the foolish neighbors say;

The first-fruits, saith the Preacher, the Lord hath taken;

But this was the old tree's late branch wrenched away,

Grieving the sapless limbs, the shorn and shaken. (P, p. 5) The
salient feature of this last stanza is the contrast between what the
neighbors and the preacher "say" or "saith," and
what the poem authenticates. The neighbors attach only facile,
descriptive terms to the dead boy; thus, they are "foolish."
The preacher employs metaphor, but as Parsons suggests, it is a stock
biblical metaphor doubtless used in other less appropriate circumstances
(p. 52). Moreover, the "first fruits" will not cohere to the
speaker's impression of the living boy as a "pig with a pasty
face." The dead boy's significance -- his meaning -- is
available only in terms of his death. The concluding construction again
conflates metonymy ("the old tree's late branch wrenched
away,/Grieving the sapless limbs") and metaphor (the family as
"old tree"), and again signals a movement away from the
speaker's discursive self-presentation to a poetic engagement with
the world around him.

John Crowe Ransom believed in the concept of "impersonality in
art." Although critics have usually applied this idea only with
respect to Ransom as poet, it also has a particular relevance for his
speakers. When the speaker of "Dead Boy" calls the deceased a
"branch," he is telling us nothing about himself; he does not
"say" in the way the neighbors and the preacher
"say." In "Dead Boy," as in most of Ransom's
poems, the speaker should be approached not merely as a personality, but
as an agent who uses language to create meaning. Poetry, Ransom reminds
us, "is a kind of language" (The World's Body, p. 235).
Resolving the uncertainty of Ransom's "I" in terms of
normal discourse will ultimately hinder us from hearing what is being
said. (1) Richard Ellmann and Robert O'Clair, eds., John Crowe
Ransom," in The Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry, 2nd ed. (New
York: Norton, 1988), p. 467. (2) David Perkins, A History of modern
Poetry: Modernism and after (Cambridge: Belknap, 1987), p. 104; Robert
Buffington, The Equilibrist: A Study of John Crowe Ransom's Poems,
1916-1963 (Nashville, Tennessee: Vanderbilt University Press, 1967), pp.
62-63. (3) Delmore Schwartz, "Instructed of Much Mortality,"
in John Crowe Ransom: Critical Essays and a Bibliography, ed. Thomas
Daniel Young (Baton Rouge: Louisiana University Press, 1968), p. 51;
Louis D. Rubin, Fr. "John Crowe Ransom's Cruell Battle'
(1958), in Young, p. 157. (4) As Noralyn Masselink points out,
Ransom's prosody "has, for the most part, been treated
incidentally, if at all,' an oversight "particularly
surprising considering the extraordinary attention Ransom pays to meter
in his own critical writings' ("Apparition Head Versus Body
Bush: The Prosodical Theory and Practice of John Crowe Ransom,"
Southern Quarterly [Winter 19911, 17-30). For other discussions of
Ransom's use of meter, see Henry W. Russell," "John Crowe
Ransom: The Measure of Civil Man," Southern Review, 32 (Spring
1987), 256-270, and William Vesterman, "The Motives of Meter in
|Bells for John Whiteside's Daughter'," Southern
Quarterly, 22 (Summer 1984), 42-53. (5) Buffington points out that
Ransom himself, in The New Criticism, comments on the overemphasis on
irony: "Mr. [Cleanth] Brooks is so insistent upon having in his
poetry some irony, some form of |conflict' and |inclusion of
opposites' that he has been led to make devastating slashes in the
poetry of an English anthology that is now well shaken down and rather
definitely accepted. . . . My belief is that opposites can never be said
to be resolved or reconciled merely because they have been got into the
same poem, or got into the same complex of affective experiences to
create there a kind of |tension'; that if there is a resolution at
all it must be a logical resolution; that when there is no resolution we
have a poem without a structural unity; and that this is precisely the
intention of irony, which therefore is something very special, and ought
to be occasional." John Crowe Ransom, The New Criticism (Norfolk,
Virginia: New Directions, 1941), pp. 94-95. (6) Roman Jakobson,
"Linguistics and Poetics," in Selected Writings, 6 vols, ed.
Stephen Rudy (The Hague: Mouton, 1981), III, 21-22. (7) The phatic and
metalingual functions, as the diagram suggests, concern themselves with
contact ("Are you on the line, Mr. Smith?") and code ("Do
you understand how I am defining |love'?"), respectively.
These functions have less bearing on the immediate topic of discussion.
(8) Although the horizontal axis of this diagram is fairly
straightforward, the vertical axis is problematic. The lyric poetry
referred to here is something like "pure" poetry (Poe's
"Bells," e.g.), the "straight" lyric Ransom
describes in the quotation cited below from The New Criticism. Jakobson
proposes a similar diagram, although he associates the lyric mode with
the emotive function. Certainly he is correct historically, although I
hope my distinction between dramatic and lyric modes justifies my
placement of them here. (9) A dramatic speaker -- Browning's Duke
of Ferrara, for instance -- exists as a "character a collection of
traits informing the entire poem. In addition, the dramatic speaker
exists in some sense "outside" the poem; the verbal
communication that comprises "My Last Duchess" suggests a man
who has made other speeches in other situations. In narrative poetry,
the speaker acts as a more or less objective locus of perception and
report. In didactic poetry, the speaker acts as an instructor and/or
exhorter, acutely aware of his audience. It need hardly be pointed out
that pure examples of these sub-genres and their respective speakers are
rare, if they exist at all. (10) Jonathan Culler, Structuralist Poetics
(Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 1975), pp. 165-166. (11)
Culler's discussion of Wallace Stevens's "Anecdote of the
jar "highlights my own differences with his position. As in many of
Ransom's poems, its speaker appears only momentarily -- once, to be
precise. Culler claims that "the fact that the deictic appears in
the poem indicates that the agency is of some importance and must be,
integrated with any interpretation" (pp. 166-167). I would contend
that the deictic plays a different hermeneutic role. In any case, it is
impossible to attribute any traits (in the common sense of the word) to
the "I," as many critics have done with similar Ransom poems.

With regard to Romanticism, Ransom's poems often show a
kinship, with the typical romantic lyric, as described by M. H. Abrams
in "Structure of the Greater Romantic Lyric," in Romanticism
and Consciousness, ed. Harold Bloom (New York: Norton, 1970), pp.
201-229. The Romantic lyric, according to Abrams, typically
"present[s] a determinate speaker in a particularized, and usually
a localized, outdoor setting, whom we overhear as he carries on, in a
fluent vernacular which rises easily to a more formal speech, a
sustained colloquy, sometimes with himself or with the outer scene, but
more frequently with a silent human auditor, present or absent. . . . In
the course of this meditation the lyric speaker achieves an insight,
faces up to a tragic loss, comes to a moral decision, or resolves an
emotional problem. Often the poem rounds upon itself to end where it
began, at the outer scene, but with an altered mood and deepened
understanding which is the result of the inter-vening meditation"
(p. 201). The "rise" from the vernacular to "more formal
speech" is similar to the speaker/poet relationship I am
describing, although the "I" in Ransom's work is often
backgrounded when this occurs. "Bells for John Whiteside's
Daughter," however, shows a particular kinship to the type of lyric
Abrams describes. (12) Throughout this essay, when I refer to a speaker
"appearing" in a poem. I am using the term to indicate the
presence of a first-person pronoun, not the "presence" (in a
more general sense) of the speaker. I have also used the masculine
pronoun to refer to the speaker, more to avoid awkward constructions
than anything else. Although the "I" often seems masculine --
in "Blue Girls," for example -- its gender is rarely explicit,
another "shadowy" aspect of the speaker. (13) John Crowe
Ransom, Poems and Essays (New York: Vintage, 1955), p. 32. Except where
noted otherwise, I have used this volume of selected poems and essays,
hereafter referred to parenthetically as (P). Ransom made two later
selections of his poetry, in 1963 and 1969, revising and adding poems
each time. Critics are nearly unanimous in agreeing that the final
Selected Poems is artistically inferior to earlier versions; there is
some disagreeme as to whether the 1955 or the 1963 edition is superior.
I have accepted Thornton Parsons's argument in favor of the 1955
edition. See John Crowe Ransom (New York: Twayne, 1969), pp. 129-162.
(14) This well-known definition of poetry, Jakobson claims that the
poetic. function combines the "two basic modes of arrangement used
in verbal behavior": the metaphoric mode of selection (based on
equivalence, similarity, dissimilarity, synonymy, and antonymy) and the
metonymic mode of combination (based on contiguity): "The poetic
function projects the principle of equivalence from the axis of
selection into the axis of combination" (""Linguistics
and Poetics," p. 27). (15) R. P. Blackmur, Form and Value in Modern
Poetry (Garden City, New York: Doubleday, 1957), p. 293. (16) Mukarovsky
sees foregrounding as the key component in poetic language: "The
function of poetic language consists in the maximum foregrounding of the
utterance. . . . [language] is not used in the services of
communication, but in order to place in the foreground the act of
expression, the act of speech itself." See Mukarovsky's
"Standard Language and Poetic Language," in A Prague School
Reader on Aesthetics, Literary Structure and Style, ed. and trans. Paul
L. Garvin (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1964), pp.
43-44. (17) William Elford Rogers, The Three Genres and the
Interpretation of Lyric Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University
Press, 1983), p. 84. (18) Cleanth Brooks, R. W. B. Lewis, and Robert
Penn Warren, "John Crowe Ransom," in American Literature: The
Makers and the Making, 2 vols. (New York: St. Martin's, 1973), p.
2644. (19) John Crowe Ransom, The World's Body (New York:
Scribner's, 1938), p. x [sic]. (20) Graham Hough, "John Crowe
Ransom: The Poet and the Critic," in Young, p. 200. (21) John
Hollander, Melodious Guile: Fictive Pattern in Poetic Language (New
Haven: Yale University Press, 1988), p. 194. (22) Robert Scholes,
Semiotics and Interpretation (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1982),
p. 23. (23) For a brief and interesting account of how poetry bounds the
language of discourse, see William Harmon's "Basho and Proust:
A Note on the Nature of Poetry," Parnassus: Poetry in Review, 11,
no.2 (1983), 186-191. Harmon locates onomatopoeia as "one of the
boundaries of poetic language," the other being hieronymy, or
proper and sacred names. These elements, which often occur at the
beginning or end of a true poem, according to Harmon, are found
throughout Ransom's poetry. In "Captain Carpenter," for
instance, the Captain's name, "God," and the onomatopoeic
"clack clack" all converge in the last stanza. Note also the
"Old Hodge" and "God" in the last stanza of
"Dog." (24) John Crowe Ransom, Two Gentlemen in Bonds (New
York: Knopf, 1927), p. 47. (25) John Crowe Ransom, "John Crowe
Ransom Reads His Works," Yale Series of Recorded Poets, ed. Alvin
B. Kernan (New Haven: Yale University Department of English, n.d.)

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